Indeed. Thankfully, algofy, you and I still have some years left to forget it ever existed. Or something.
Yes. In the CME pits, "handles" were communicated with a jerking motion. For example, to signal a price movement of 5 handles, you would make a jerking motion 5 times.
I wrote --- "The ES moves in "handles", and "ticks". There are 4 ticks to a handle. The YM moves in Dow "points". Each point is a tick. The spread on the YM and ES is typically "one tick". When discussing the ES, competent folks use the term 'ticks' ...when using the term "points" with the ES, it is highly likely to lead to confusion. "handles" and "ticks" when discussing the ES eliminates **all** possibilities of confusion; If the internet is down and you call your broker to move, cancel or place a stop/adjust a bracket; and insist on using "points" instead of ticks and handles, all bets are "off".
On the contrary, "points" is the terminology (correctly) used in all the exchange and official documentation for the instrument: it's the slang nicknames like "handles" that cause the confusion to which it appears you've fallen victim.
I disagree. There are no such terms as "handles" and "ticks" in either the ES contract specification or in the ES rule book. Sure, you can call your broker over the phone and say, "Yo, it's choppy out there. I wanna move my stop two handles, three ticks, and one pip on five cars of my ES position, and puke the remaining seven cars". What's likely to happen is that your broker will ask you to speak the "contractual" language. An example would be: "Place a limit order to buy ten September 2017 S&P 500 e-mini future contracts at $2474.25".
@speedo .. So how many handles you get in the ES TODAY? It is dead as a wooden peg from the medieval age. I have barely scrapped 1 and quarter handles. Or as handle123 wpuld say a buck and a quarter.